superfluous in it.
She wondered where Iris and Ruby were sitting now, trying to imagine the room and its decoration. It took on a Moroccan flavour, inevitably. Lesley had never been to Cairo, but in the 1970s she had run a business that imported fabrics and furniture from North Africa, mostly from Marrakesh. In those days, however, Iris had been working elsewhere and when the two of them met it was during Iris’s brief visits to England, or once or twice elsewhere in Europe. Iris travelled wherever and whenever she could, usually alone, usually with the minimum of luggage and complete disregard for her own comfort. She didn’t mind sleeping on airport benches and riding in the backs of trucks. Living as she did, in African villages where she provided basic medical care for the poorest women and children, being comfortable didn’t have as many complicated factors as it did for most people.
Lesley remembered how they had once met up in a hotel in Rome. The doorman had looked askance at Iris when she walked into the lobby. Her clothes were not dirty, but they were worn and unmatching. She carried a couple of African woven bags, her face was bare and her feet were splayed in flat leather sandals. She walked straight across the marble floor to where Lesley was waiting, and the smartly dressed Italian crowd fell back to make way for her. Nobody knew who she was, but everyone knew she was somebody.
And it was Lesley, in her Armani and Ferragamo, who felt overdressed.
On a whim, she had ordered champagne cocktails for them both. Iris seized and drank hers with such delight (‘how heavenly! Oh, what a taste of the lovely wicked world’) that Lesley suddenly understood why her mother chose a life in which a drink in a hotel bar could deliver so much pleasure.
Of course, her imagined Moroccan-style interior was probably much too elaborate and over-designed to come anywhere close to reality. Iris’s actual house would be bare, verging on uncomfortable.
Now Ruby was there with her. They had taken a distinct liking to each other, the two of them. Lesley had understood that from the telephone conversations, although no one had mentioned it.
What were they talking about? What were they telling each other?
Jealousy fluttered in her, and she did her best to ignore it.
The quiet of her own house was oppressive. It was a long time since she had spoken to Ruby’s father, Lesley realised. She resolved to give him a call.
Iris and Ruby ate dinner together, in a small room through an archway off the double-height hall. Auntie rubbed a grey veil of dust off the table and Mamdooh lit a pair of tall candles, so Ruby understood that this was an occasion. As she gazed upwards into the dim, cobwebbed heights Iris briefly explained to her that the celebration hall was where important male guests would have been entertained. The musicians would have taken their places on the dais at the end and there might also have been a belly-dancer. The women of the household would have watched the party from the upper gallery, hidden from the men’s view behind the pierced screens.
‘Why?’
Iris frowned. ‘Do you know nothing about Islamic culture?’
‘Not really.’
‘The women occupy the haramlek, a part of the house reserved for them, where men may enter only by invitation. There is a separate staircase, a whole suite of rooms including the one where you sleep. And the other half, where the men may move freely, where visitors come, is the salamlek. Respectable women and men do not mingle as they do in the West.’
Ruby wondered, is she talking about then – the past – or today?
She listened, and ate hungrily. The meal was a simple affair of flat bread and spiced beans cooked with tomatoes and onions, of which Iris hardly touched anything. Ruby noted that her skin was stretched like paper tissue over her wrists, with tea-coloured stains spilt all over the knobs and cords of her hands. She wore no rings.
Mamdooh and Auntie came softly back to remove the remains of the meal.
‘Ya, Mamdooh, Auntie. We have decided that Ruby will be staying here with us for a few days, before she goes back to her mother in England. We must make her welcome to Cairo.’
Mamdooh’s expression did not change as he nodded his head, but Auntie’s walnut face cracked into a smile that revealed inches of bare gum and a few isolated teeth.
After the shuffle of their slippers had died away Ruby sighed. ‘Mamdooh’s got a problem with me, hasn’t he?’
Iris folded her napkin and slipped it into a worn silver ring. Ruby hastily uncrumpled hers and copied her.
‘He is set in his ways, that’s all. We both are. Do you know, when I was about your age, Mamdooh’s father was our house suffragi? He looked after us. Sarah, Faria and me. The three flowers of Garden City. I remember our Mamdooh when he was a plump little boy who followed his father to work. So we have known each other for sixty years.’
Ruby waited for more, but Iris seemed to have lost herself. At last she shook her head.
‘We are set in our ways. It will do us good to have a change in our routine. Give me your arm, please. I think I will go to bed now.’
With Iris leaning on her, Ruby walked slowly through the dim rooms to the haramlek staircase. Iris was explaining that during Ramadan the faithful did not eat or drink between sun-up and sunset, and it was tiring for the old people. If Ruby wouldn’t mind helping her to bed, they could eat their meal and have an evening’s rest.
‘Sure,’ Ruby agreed.
In Iris’s bedroom she drew the white curtains and turned down the covers. She helped her grandmother to take off the striped robe and the old-fashioned camisole beneath. The creased-paper skin of her shoulders and upper arms was blotted with the same pale stains as her hands and her shoulder blades protruded sharply, like folded wings. She was as fragile as a child but at the same time there was a lack of concern in her, a disregard for her body that impressed Ruby with its simple strength. Ruby herself was prudishly modest. She hated exposing more than a calculated and obvious few inches of her own flesh. Doctors’ visits were torture, even sex was less of a major essential than it was cracked up to be. That was one of the reasons why she liked Jas. He was just as happy to lie down and hug and whisper. Without being like … like two dogs behind a wheelie bin.
They had once seen a pair of dogs at it, and although they had laughed Ruby had been disgusted.
‘Thank you,’ Iris said coolly once she was in bed. It was only eight o’clock. Ruby lingered, not knowing what she was going to do with herself for the rest of the evening. Her glance fell on the framed photograph on the bedside table. A young woman, certainly Iris herself, stood with a tall man in an army shirt. Her back curved against him, his arm circled her waist. Their bodies seemed to fit one against the other, like a carving or a sculpture. She was just going to ask about him when she saw Iris’s face and the surprising fierce flash of warning in it. She took a step away from the bedside.
‘You can turn out the light by the door,’ Iris told her.
Ruby mumbled goodnight.
In her own bedroom she knelt at the window and pressed her face to the glass. Down in the darkness she thought she saw a figure looking up, but she didn’t like the idea of anyone being able to see into her room and moved hastily aside. She sat down on the edge of the bed instead and took stock.
The upside was that she had got away, from
